Commentary by Michael Wade on Leadership, Ethics, Management, and Life

Sunday, February 13, 2011

An Evening with Lewis and Freud

Freud and Lewis take turns throughout “Freud’s Last Session” becoming each other’s patients for psychoanalysis—a pursuit that sometimes leads to frustration, but always clarifies both their motives as they deliver their philosophical arguments. As the arguments of the play move more deeply into the men’s personal biographies, we start to see their commonalities. Indeed, the main satisfaction of the play is the irony of two extraordinary intellects arguing religious belief on rational grounds, at the same time trying to uncover each other’s hidden motives, getting at the “world beneath the world.”

At one point, Lewis remarks that it is madness to think the two could settle such questions in an afternoon. Freud replies that the greater madness would be not to think about such things at all.